This book is all about Love. Love, in this book, tatters its own lovers. Billy, Dennis — Billy’s best friend — and Maeve are coping with the final edge of a lifelong grief. This is a book about discovering long-buried secrets, and whether it is better to know or not to know.
No one writes better about regret, the chimeras of the past, and about the inadequacy of possible love, the chimeras of the future, than McDermott: "In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion."